Where do you stand?

Do fee-charging academic journals offer value added?

Academics are increasingly up in arms about the hefty fees they have to stump up for must-read journals. They criticise the journals They point out that much of what publishers charge for, like peer review, is done for free by researchers themselves. Distribution costs, too, have dwindled with the growth of the internet (of which academics were early adopters). The publishers retort that the high fees (and 37% margins) are justified to ensure quality and cover the admittedly non-zero costs of peer review, editing and dissemination. The profits, they add, are proof that the journals are a valuable product that academics have (however grudgingly) been willing to pay for. So, do commercial academic journals offer value added? Cast your vote and join the discussion.

The Internet has brought cost efficiency to many realms, and each time consumers have run to the technology and prices have gone down. More use, lower cost. The academic publishing world resists the inevitable hoping that by the time the wave flows over them they will have figured out a new way to extract money from researchers and their organizations. But organizations that have resisted the potential of the Internet sometimes lose all their value.
So let's
1) stop publishing on paper. That'll save lots of paper, printing, paper handling, paper typesetting, and distribution costs [and the Earth will thank us],
2) ask publishers to identify what their costs are - we expect non-profits to move a certain percentage of revenue to actual value, how much of the publisher's revenue is actually going to publishing?
May the most cost-efficient publishers stay in business and the rest eventually fade away.

There is a great deal of misunderstanding and misinformation about this topic leaking into the public sphere. Here are some facts: there are for-profit and not-for-profit publishers, both of whom can publish Open Access and restricted access journals; Open Access journals can be for-profit, and many are; both subscription fees for restricted access journals and author fees for Open Access journals can appear unacceptably high; the vast majority of the most important scientific papers are published in journals owned by academic societies; publishers add value to the peer review and editorial process, evidenced by the hundreds of academic societies which pay publishers to publish their journals on their behalf; people tend to assume that publishers' input into to an academic paper is limited to formatting, printing, and mailing printed copies - in fact, these operational processes are a small part of a publisher's role; publishers add value through organising, managing, prioritising, and increasing access to research.

Peer review is not free or even close to it. The fact that reviewers are not paid is irrelevant. It takes a paid staff to run the peer review process. Some journals hire PhDs to run peer review, and they don't work for free. The peer review process for scientific journals usually includes an online manuscript submission and review system, which is not free. Most editors receive a stipend or honorarium, which is rarely discussed. Some or all of that money may go to a researcher's institution, but it still has to be paid by the publisher. Those honoraria can run into the tens of thousands of dollars, especially for top researchers (who are generally the people you want to serve as editor). The repeated claims that peer review is free or nearly free are rubbish. Peer review for a single journal can easily cost $100,000 a year.

I am not too happy with the simplification of the term "publishers". Even commercial publishers might be operating not-for-profit. And obviously the survey seeks to highlight the frustration with the large profit-maximizing publishing groups. What we also need in this discussion is a clear definition of "value". Publishing in journals has several functions for authors and readers which reflects on the corresponding value. No, there is no value that publishers can bring to the pure dissemination of information. Scholarly communities with preprint cultures like Physics have shown that this function can be met by a server like arXiv.org. Reputation building however seems to be highly interwoven with the work of commercial publishers.

CONFLATING SUBSCRIPTION FEES AND (GOLD) OPEN ACCESS PUBLICATION FEES - AND MISSING THE POINT
You are mixing up two kinds of fees: subscription fees, charged by journals to users' institutions in exchange for access and publication fees, charged by (some) journal to authors' institutions in exchange for providing free online access ("open access") to all users.
Yes, subscriptions overcharge enormously; so do open-access journals ("gold open access"). But there is another way for authors to provide free online access to their journal articles for all users whose institutions cannot afford subscription access: authors can self-archive the final, peer-reviewed draft in their open-access institutional repositories as soon as they are accepted for publication ("green open access").
Researchers' funders and institutions have begun mandating (requiring) green open access self-archiving, but publishers have been lobbying vehemently that they should instead be paid even more for "hybrid gold open access," which is when a journal continues to collect subscriptions but, in addition, sells gold open access to individual authors who agree to pay a publication fee (which can be from $1500 to $3000 or more per paper published).
Suppose you're a subscription journal publisher. Adding a Hybrid (Subscription/Gold) Open Access (OA) option means you keep selling subscriptions as before, but -- on top of that -- you charge (whatever you like) as an extra fee for selling Gold OA, for a single article, to any author who agrees to pay extra for it.
How much do you charge? It's up to you. For example, if you publish 100 articles per year and your total annual revenue is $X, you can charge 1% of $X for hybrid Gold OA per article.
Once you've got that for 1% of your articles (plus your unaltered subscription revenue of $X) you've earned $X + 1% for that year.
Good business.
And now in the UK -- thanks to the Finch committee recommendations and the revised RCUK OA policy -- if the UK provides 6% of the world's research articles yearly, then on average 6% of the articles in any journal will be fee-based hybrid Gold OA. That means worldwide publisher revenue -- let's say it's $XXX per year -- will increase from $XXX per year to $XXX + 6% per year at the UK tax-payer's (and UK research's) expense.
Not bad.
Publishers are not too dense to do the above arithmetic. They've already done it. That is what hybrid Gold is predicated upon. And that is why publishers are so pleased with Finch/RCUK: "The world purports to want OA? Fine. We're ready to sell it to them -- on top of what we're selling them already."
In the UK, Finch and RCUK have obligingly eliminated hybrid Gold OA's only real competition (Green OA) -- Finch by ignoring it completely, and RCUK by forcing fundees to pay for Gold -- rather than to provide cost-free green -- whenever the publisher has the sense to offer hybrid Gold.
Of course, publishers will say (and sometimes even mean it) that they are not really trying to inflate their already ample income even further. As the uptake of hybrid Gold increases, they will proportionately lower the cost of subscriptions -- until subscriptions are gone, and all that's left, like the Cheshire Cat's grin, is Gold OA revenue (now no longer hybrid but "pure") -- and at the same bloated levels as today's subscriptions.
So what? The goal, after all, was always OA, not Green OA or Gold OA or saving money on subscriptions. Who cares if all that money is being wasted?
I don't.
I care about all the time (and with it all the OA usage and impact and research progress) that has been lost for so many years already, and that will continue to be lost, if the ill-informed, short-sighted and profligate Finch/RCUK policy prevails instead of being (easily) corrected.
Uncorrected, both global OA growth and precious time will continue to be wasted. The joint thrall of Gold Fever (the belief that "OA" means "Gold OA," together with an irresistible desire to have Gold OA now, no matter what the cost, come what may) and Rights Rapture (the irresistible desire for certain further re-use rights, over and above free online access, even though only a few fields need them, whereas all fields urgently need -- and lack -- free online access) keeps the research community from mandating the cost-free Green OA that is already fully within their reach and would bring them 100% OA globally in next to no time. Instead, they are left chasing along the CC-BYways after gold dust year upon year, at unaffordable, unnecessary, unsustainable and unscalable extra cost.
See:
Urgent Need to Revise the New RCUK Open Access Policyhttp://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/927-.html
How and Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised
(Digital Research 2012 Keynote, Oxford, September 11)http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/926-.html
How to Repair the New RCUK OA Policyhttp://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/923-.html

Scholarly journals are an absolute necessity for academicians, especially, researchers who need to know what is happening the world over in their subject in order to remain in the forefront of research. This gives publishers of such journals an opportunity to charge huge fees for their services and earn exhorbitant profits. The work they do has been reducing over the years, especially with the widespread adoption of computers and the Internet.

Today, most research is funded by the public. Research articles are written by people who are paid by the public. Review and editing of the articles also are done by researchers who are paid by the public. What the publisher does is essentially co-ordinating the activity and distributing the printed material. The last is increasingly being done through the Internet, though the print medium is still required for those regions of the world which still do not have good Internet facility, After all this, the colleagues of the researchers who did all this and members of the public who can benefit from these articles, often have to pay again to read them. This is gross injustice. Perhaps, this is the only business where someone can reap such profits doing virtually nothing. The academic community has to come together and put a stop to this exploitation. Happily, this has begun to happen and the widespread support for the move to boycott Elsevier should be seen as a powerful signboard. It clearly shows that if the publishers do not reform themselves, they stand the real risk of becoming redundant and losing their entire business. This has already happened in the case of some journals such as the "Journal of Algorithms" and "Topology" both published by Elsevier. In both cases, alternative journals were started by the research community to replace the ones that got wound up, In both cases, the entire editoral boards resigned in protest of the practice of over-charging for the journals.

In the same vein that the entire Bodleian Library is being made digital and freely available online - the same should happen for all academic research. Knowledge disseminated freely and globally via the net means that even a poverty ridden budding genius has the chance to undertake research and push forward the boundaries knowledge. And even that produces even one genius every generation, the cost would be worth it. A truly public good.

Academic journals are meant for serious and genuine researchers or literate community. These are used by scholars who may not be affluent to buy commercial quality journals. Only it need to be ensured that these go to right persons or institutes

Publishers have used clever marketing techniques such as 'bundles' which force institutional subscribers in particular to sponsor the growth of a given publishing house. In the publishing scene, it seems like publishers are making use of the power of perception- the perception that some journals are a must-have so that the publishers can charge exorbitant fees but the subscribers will still pay. This has been investigated elsewhere. I think that publishers have played their cards well and have made good business, but it's time for them to start being less great at making profit and more financially accessibly- it simply isn't ethical at all and there is little regulation of their fees.

The fees go towards professional copy-editing, typesetting, illustration, proofreading and indexing, among other things. I'm not convinced that the open-access publishers are cost-effective in these areas.

From an academic's point of view, fee-charging journals do a little bit of useful work. They do some nice typesetting, the shuffle the paperwork back and forth from author to reviewer to editor, and they maintain a nice website. All of that is valuable, but not very valuable or difficult.

Most journals probably can't justify more than one full-time employee: it should be mostly computerized these days.

I just add what I think it is important to research for knowledge and application in real life. In journal article, the researcher should balance (included) concept and real life application especially the key insights about the actual application (the conditions and environment that makes it success or failure). What is more important, is how the database (hosting site) help us to organise the related subject that we want. Basically, it should include recommendation for journal articles that related to the subject being searched (sort by descending order). In summary, we wanted to know what are the history of progress being made to the subject being searched. In knowledge and information technology era, structure and organisation of knowledge are crucial for fast learning and application in this speed of light century.

In my ideal world, we wish journal articles can be organised and reorganised to suit the subject being searched. Instead of just abstract, the organised knowledge should be presented in just one or two pages with all the critical information to be read. Later if we need more details, we refer to the full journal article.